Flat Sales Have Brewers Crying In Their Alternative Beverages

Suds - a dud?

Beer Makers Are Getting Creative And Pushing New Products To Boost Business.

May 23, 1993|By Nancy Feigenbaum of The Sentinel Staff

If some days are better than others, as the Michelob jingle goes, then this is one of the bad ones. It's 9 p.m. on a weekend, and Alan Jones, Randall Higgins and Laura Sobbott are unwinding at a bar in downtown Orlando.

Not one is drinking beer.

Jones holds a bottle of O'Doul's, one of those beer substitutes with almost no alcohol. Sobbott, who doesn't like beer, is drinking a daiquiri. Higgins is nursing a glass of water, having already finished an O'Doul's.

''I don't actually think it's as good, but it's not bad. Tastes like maybe mediocre beer,'' says Jones, who prefers beer but says he did all the drinking he could stand the night before.

Statistically, these types of people are giving the beer industry a headache. They are the hangover generation from the beer bash that ended in the 1980s.

The waning interest in beer has kept sales relatively flat - to use the pun even beer analysts can't resist. Brewers have had to find some creative ways to avoid falling behind, including rolling out such trendy new products as clear beer.

Beer sales hit the 188 million barrel mark in 1990, but a combination of taxes and the recession have kept the $45 billion-or-so annual industry from growing much further. In Central Florida, despite all its tourists and college students, beer sales grew less than half of 1 percent in fiscal 1992 to 87.5 million gallons.

Even Cheers, the beer-centered television sitcom, has signed off the air.

In 1981, the nation's party animals each imbibed the equivalent of 361 12-ounce servings of beer - the most since taxation opened the flow of malt beverage statistics in 1947.

Beer drinkers have been cutting back since.

The drinkers of the 1970s are now dieting, abstaining, getting up early to feed the kids and - when they do drink - switching to wine or liquor. And, sadly for beer makers, those people are becoming more numerous as the baby boomer population ages.

The heaviest drinkers are those ages 18 to 34, but they account for just 28 percent of the population. The lighter drinkers, ages 35 to 54, make up 35 percent of the population.

''It's kind of a stand-off,'' said Robert S. Weinberg, a former college professor in St. Louis who studies beer drinkers for the nation's manufacturers.

Population growth generally makes up for conservative drinking, he said. And a few rainy weekends in a row can wipe out any gains for the year.

Some ideas for boosting the beer slump are out of the question. Other food industries could try to recruit more customers by boasting about the health benefits of their products or targeting a particular kind of person. But society has lately made much of the evils of drinking, so beer makers must brew their strategies delicately.

As a publicly traded company, a big brewer has to show some gains from year to year, despite the decline in beer drinkers' appetites.

''It must continue to grow to keep its stock price high and to keep stockholders happy,'' Steinman said.

The industry's chief tactic appears to be the creation of new products - low-alcohol beer, nonalcoholic beer, bottled draft beer, dry beer and now clear beer. New products give brewers a shot at extra shelf space and a better chance at reaching drinkers who want other types of products.

Clear beer, an odd product that looks like water with a foam head on it, still is in the testing phase at the Miller Brewing Co. The Coors Brewing Co. is also testing a clear drink, called Zima Clearmalt, but doesn't label it beer or promise that it will foam, describing it instead as ''a new category of flavored malt beverage.''

None of the new products has been as good for the beer industry as the low-calorie beer that Miller made successful in 1973. Miller says more than 30 percent of beer drinkers today imbibe low-calorie brands.

Dry beer, a phenomenon in Japan, puzzled people in the United States.

''What does it mean? God only knows. I think that's one of the reasons that it didn't fly,'' said Helen Berry, vice president of marketing at the Beverage Marketing Corp. in New York.

A successful new product might be one that attracts women drinkers, who account for something less than 20 percent of beer sales. Analysts think brewers are aiming clear beers at women, but Miller and Coors are coy on this point, unwilling to risk alienating the approximately 80 percent of their drinkers who are male.

''We're bringing in people who have enjoyed wine before this - mixed drinks, wine,'' said Julie Demlow, corporate communications manager for Coors in Golden, Colo. She said that in test markets, which now include 40 percent of the United States, Zima is doing ''phenomenally well.''

But some of the alternatives to the big-name domestic beers are coming from foreign companies and the tiny U.S. breweries that make pricey, obscure brands. At bars such as Jax Fifth Avenue Deli and Ale House in Winter Park and Go Lounge in Orlando, imports and unusual domestic brands dominate the menu.